For most people, Amazon is the ultimate e-commerce website, a store where books, music, movies, and all manner of other products can easily be purchased online. However, since 2006, the company has also been offering cloud computing capabilities and other IT solutions for major corporate clients. The program in question, Amazon Web Services, provides everything from basic software to data storage, all through the cloud.

Amazon is a unique player in the cloud computing industry, mostly because their major competitors are companies like Microsoft and Google, both of which have years of software and hardware development under their belts. Amazon’s roots are distinctly different, and yet, Amazon Web Services is thriving.

Indeed, according to a recent report from the New York Times, Amazon is positively dominant in the cloud computing sphere. A report cited by the article ranked Amazon as the leader in “cloud infrastructure services,” with 27 percent of the market. Microsoft was in second place, but only had 10 percent.

Furthermore, Amazon is shooting to widen that lead. In 2014 alone, the company has released roughly 450 new programs and products for its cloud computing network. In other words, Amazon is working hard to overcome its inherent disadvantage of being a tech player without much of a tech history. And from the looks of it, that work is paying off: Amazon says that it is storing 137 percent as much data on cloud servers as it was last year.

Of course, it helps that cloud computing itself is a growing industry. As the NY Times article notes, it was only a few years ago that companies started trading physical software and on-site data storage for cloud systems and servers. Back then, most of the companies taking the plunge were small start-ups. Now, Amazon Web Services has major clients like Netflix and General Electric, and huge corporations everywhere are testing out cloud computing.

The growth will intensify the competition that Amazon faces in cloud computing, and those providers will try to eat away at the company’s current quarter-market share. Still, Amazon has a substantial head start in cloud computing, and that early lead will help the company to remain a major player in the industry – even as corporations with a greater bulk of resources start focusing on the market.